STOP COMPLAINING…

STOP COMPLAINING…

Is that even remotely possible?

It really bothers me when people say ‘when you are complaining you have no shoes, there’s someone somewhere who wishes they had legs’ or ‘when you complain about life there is someone battling
for his last breath’ or ‘while you complain about a friend going on and on about a story you don’t want to hear there is someone who cannot hear’… and they are an endless torment for me. I mean, I get the point, you know-we should be grateful with whatever has been provided for us rather than complain about what we do not have.

But again this is a two-sided coin. When we go around campaigning for such means to instill gratitude in people, do we consider that there actually are cripples, or blind people or deaf people in our midst do we seriously think they do not come to hear of such comments?

My problem primarily is not what is said but how it is said. I have spent the last four months learning discourse analysis and there is one thing I have come to really appreciate, the power of speech. I mean what we intend to say and what we actually say are totally poles apart. So back to this gratitude-forcing-statement. What happens to the blind person? Is he allowed to complain then? And if he is allowed to complain, doesn’t it put in double-standards to the way that we ‘ought’ to do things?

I mean look at it this way, there is some rich person who lives in a castle so to speak – you on the other hand live in a single roomed house with your parents and two siblings. So you complain that you wish you would have at least a two-bedroomed house, one for your parents, the other for you and your siblings. But here is the catch, there is a homeless person in the streets who wishes he could even have a tent, at least somewhere he would lay his head. So lesson to you – BE FREAKING GRATEFUL FOR WHAT YOU HAVE! So what happens to the homeless guy-can he grumble about the homeless state he is in? Well, according to this principle, he can because there is no one who can be worse than him, is there?

Do you see the double standards? So I have been thinking about it. Jeez!!! It drains the energy out of me (smh). I wish people could devise other means of driving their point home. In my opinion, (which you have no obligation to agree with), I think you should simply tell people to appreciate what they have rather than focus on what they don’t. (Yeah, I know-we heard that since we were kids from the popular Sunday school song count your blessings…) But it actually works, without diminishing other people.

You see the ‘there is someone who wishes for a home’ approach makes you consider yourself better than them but the ‘focus on what you have’ approach emphasizes instead on the fact that you cannot have it all. Yu will get to where you want to someday.

Parting shot – please please please do not be grateful simply because you have been guilt-tripped into being grateful, be grateful because you actually have reason to be grateful.

#cheers#